Guide/Natural Gas Geysers

Someones math is horribly wrong, One Gas Geyser cannot support 7 generators even with the help of 16 fertilizer makers, 16 x 10 = 160 + 120 = 280 / 90 = 3.111.

Natural Gas Geysers are a great source of power for your colony. However, when it comes to getting the most out of your geysers, there are a lot of considerations.(NOTE: This page is considered outdated in the Cosmic Upgrade, as currently Fertilizer Synthesizers don't just take Polluted Water, but Dirt and Phosphorite too.)

The Puzzle Pieces
Natural Gas Generators consume Natural Gas and produce Polluted Water and Carbon Dioxide. This Carbon Dioxide can be used by Carbon Skimmers to produce more Polluted Water. The Polluted Water, in turn, can be used by Fertilizer Synthesizers to produce fertilizer, which also produces more Natural Gas. Here are the numbers:

One additional piece to note is that an Carbon Skimmer also consumes up to 1000g of clean water per second. However, this doesn't depend on any of the other structures, so just keep that requirement in mind for now.

Putting It All Together
So this seems pretty complicated. However, we can express each of these resources as an equation in terms of the number of each of these structures. Let's use the variables from the table above to refer to how many of each structure we'll need.


 * CO2: $$22.5G = 300S$$


 * Polluted Water: $$67.5G + 1000S = 150M$$


 * Natural Gas: $$100Y + 20M = 60G$$

That's a lot of equations. To figure this out, let's try to solve for the number of other structure for each geyser. First, we can solve the CO2 equation to get how many scrubbers we need per generator:


 * $$S = \frac{11}{40}G = 0.275G$$

This means each generator supplies 0.275 scrubbers. Next, let's plug this into the Polluted Water equation to get how many makers we need per generator:


 * $$67.5G + (1000)(\frac{11}{40})G = 150M$$
 * $$\frac{685}{2}G = 150M$$
 * $$M = \frac{137}{60}G \approx 2.28 G$$

This means we need about 2.28 Fertilizer Synthesizers per generator. Finally, let's plug this into the Natural Gas equation to figure out how many generators we can support per geyser:


 * $$100Y + (20)(\frac{137}{60})G = 60G$$
 * $$100Y + \frac{137}{3}G = 60G$$
 * $$100Y = \frac{43}{3}G$$
 * $$G = \frac{300}{43}Y \approx 6.98 Y$$

This means each geyser supports about 6.98 generators, account for its own natural gas production and the natural gas of the Fertilizer Synthesizers that are supplied by the Polluted Water from both sources. Now we can propagate this count backward through the other equations to get the counts for the other buildings:


 * $$M = (\frac{137}{60})(\frac{300}{43})Y = \frac{685}{43}Y \approx 15.93Y$$, or 15.93 Fertilizer Synthesizers per geyser.


 * $$S = (\frac{11}{40})(\frac{300}{43})Y = \frac{165}{86}Y \approx 1.92Y$$, or 1.92 Carbon Skimmers per geyser.

Maximum Capacity of a Geyser
All in all, this means that each natural gas geyser can support the following buildings:

Additionally, you need one Gas Pump to supply the generators, one Liquid Pump to feed Polluted Water to the Fertilizer Synthesizers, and one more Liquid Pump to feed clean Water to the Carbon Skimmer, so there is an additional cost of 720 W.

Overall, you can produce 2719 W of power per geyser (double the normal output of 1333 W!), at a cost of 1919 g/s of clean water. Note that a Steam Geyser produce 4kg/s of water on average, so one Steam Geyser can supply two natural gas geysers' worth of these systems.

Scaling it Down
16 Fertilizer Synthesizers and 7 Natural Gas Generators is kind of a lot. You may not need or want that much production, at least for a while. So how do you scale this down? You have at least three options:


 * 1) Use less than the full 120 g/s of the geyser. This would mean following the calculations above with a smaller value for the geyser.
 * 2) Reduce the CO2 scrubbing, and freeze or otherwise dispose of the extra CO2 instead.
 * 3) Reduce fertilizer production, using less polluted water and boiling it or otherwise disposing of it.

Design Considerations
6.98 generators consume 418 g/s of natural gas, so you can get away with a single gas pump. It should conserve power once the pipe system is full of natural gas. However, the last generator will not limit itself to the 58 g/s of natural gas; it will consume 60 g/s unless you use a valve to limit its flow rate.

All of these machines produce heat, particularly the generators. To keep this running, you will need a cooling system. See the Temperature Management guide for more discussion of cooling systems.

When all 7 generators are running, that's 5600W of power running on the wires. You need to use either Heavi-Watt Wire or separate the wire systems. If you separate wires, then each generator can power six Fertilizer Synthesizers with 80W left to spare. So, for example, you could have this set of wire systems. Note that for this to work properly every system needs to be connected to a battery; you can monitor the health of the system by whether its battery stays full.


 * One generator powering the two Carbon Skimmers, one Gas Pump, and one Liquid Pump, and any doorways you have into the complex
 * Two of the generators on a separate system, each powering a set of six Fertilizer Synthesizers (80 W left over from each)
 * The part-time generator (running 98% of the time) powering the last two Fertilizer Synthesizers, and the clean water pump (53 W left over)
 * One generator powering a cooling system for the whole assembly.
 * Two generators each powering some 800W subsystem of your base

When initially building the complex, it may get lots of other gases in it. You can help prime the system by providing an external source of polluted water to just run the Fertilizer Synthesizers, until the complex is full of natural gas. You can place outlets for the other gases at the top, as natural gas is heavy and will displace everything except CO2 and Chlorine. Once it's full, you can use a filter to get rid of the small amount of impurities, then switch it over to a direct, unfiltered line later.